INTRODUCTION
If our body were to perform or work at its normal rate without enzymes then reactions that happen in our cells like the production of ATP would happen at such a slow rate that our cells would not be able to function properly. An enzyme is a biological catalyst. Anything that involves the breaking down or building up of substances requires an enzyme (Kent, 2000). Cellular reactions involve production of substances like hormones or the breaking down of waste and using an enzyme would make the reaction happen at a faster rate than normal.
Although enzymes take part in a reaction, it is important to understand that they are not used up in the reaction but can be used over and over again (Tucker & Woods, 1995), this is what makes them so effective and ideal because they have the same structure before and after the reaction.
As well as speeding up reactions, enzymes also allow reaction to happen at lower temperature and this means that body temperatures don’t have to be so high.
Enzymes are only needed in small amounts and they are specific to one substrate (Alford & Hill, 2000), this means that a substrate will bind to an enzyme’s active site only if it has the shape and is able to interact with forces on the active site to form a substrate-enzyme complex (Biology department, 2013). Specificity of an enzyme is actually a very important characteristic because if any substrate could just bind to an enzyme’s binding site, the reactions in a cell would happen at an uncontrolled rate. This means that the role of the active site in an enzyme is the regulation of reactions.
The rate of reactions could be increased in other ways like increasing the temperature or increasing the concentration of the solution but this may be not ideal for the cells and might even destroy the cells. Most reactions that take place require activation energy to cross the energy barrier but at times these energy barriers prevent chemical reactions from happening. All...